Reports in the past few days about the cost of sick leave as well as the plan to allow parents of young children to use their sick leave allotment to stay home when their sons or daughters are unwell did not get too much attention.
Yet the numbers are staggering and deal quite a big blow to employers, not to mention the effects on production and services, and the added burden on employees who have to take over their colleagues’ tasks. This is more so in the private sector, where the number of employees is limited to reduce labour costs. The plan to introduce what will be known as parental sick leave will only add to the employers’ frustrations and complaints.
The last figures available show that sickness days cost employers €37.1 million in 2012, which was the highest figure in five years, according to the National Statistics Office. Employees – in the public and private sectors – took 645,313 days of sick leave that year, an increase of more than 9,000 days over the previous 12 months.
I am sure that many of the days taken as sick leave are due to genuine reasons, but I am also sure that many other days are taken as sick leave without there being a need. In a nutshell, many employees take sick leave unnecessarily, and given the system in place it is easy for many workers to fake sickness and not go to work.
Some plan their sick leave allotment as part of their vacation leave, and take it for spring cleaning the house or garage. Others take sick leave for the slightest of colds or sore throat, and when their body temperature is normal. On cold, rainy days, it is lovely to stay beneath the warm covers rather than go to work.
Some may argue that the numbers given above are low, because each employee takes an average of “only” between four and five days of sick leave per year, which would be within normality. But employers will argue back that while there are employees who take sick leave in exceptional circumstances and when they are genuinely ill, others use up their entitlement each and every year. It is easy to deduce that the latter are abusing the system.
The lowest sick leave entitlement is 10 days of sick leave per year, and this is in places where there is no collective agreement or wage regulation order. In truth, I’ve been told sick leave entitlement varies between 15 and 20 days at full pay and half the amount at half pay. This depends on the different categories of work or collective agreements, or both. Some companies even offer small financial incentives for employees who do not take sick leave, but this amount is too small to stop workers from taking sick leave when they just don’t feel like going to work.
In the headline I gave my suggestion how such an issue could be resolved – my idea is to eliminate sick leave entitlement completely, while at the same time add a few more days to the vacation leave workers have every year. Currently, the number stands at 24; my suggestion is to round it up to 30 days – the average of sick leave taken, as said earlier, is between four and five days, so an extra six days of “vacation” leave is more than enough.
But then these 30 days are to be used both for vacation and/or sick leave. Once these 30 days are over, there should be no payment for days missed from work. Not even half pay.
In exceptional circumstances, and I really mean exceptional, such as a long-term hospital stay or an injury that makes it hard for an employee to go to work, there could then be some form of arrangement, some kind of fund, or some type of social assistance that could financially support the person involved without adding a burden on the employer.
I am sure that employers stand to gain in all this. Although the number of days employees are out of office at full pay climbs to six full working weeks, this would be compensated by a reduction in the abuse of sick leave, which would mean more days at work. Those who do not take sick leave unnecessarily would have six more days away from work, but those who today annually take 15 to 20 days of sick leave per year will either have to cut down on their abuse, or else end up taking leave without pay once the 30 days they are allotted run out.
It would also serve as an incentive for workers to take sick leave only when they are ill – simply because it would suit them better to have more days of “vacation” instead of using their 30-day allotment for sick leave purposes. Employees who do not abuse the sick leave system will also be happy with those six extra days of vacation leave. Only those workers who abuse will be the worse off and, frankly, they deserve it.
Added to this, companies would also eliminate the cost of recruiting doctors on retainer fees to turn up at their employees’ homes to check on them and issue sickness certificates.
The introduction of parental sick leave will only serve to add to abuse of the sick leave system. For one thing, if a mother or father has “saved” some sick leave days at full pay they will in all probability use them all up towards the end of the year as “extra” holidays during the Christmas season. Added to this, given that in the majority of cases it is the mother that stays at home with a sick child, employers will now be more reluctant to employ mothers of young children who want to return to employment.
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